Webb Telescope Reveals How Light Emerged From the Fog of the Early Universe

Isaac Schultz - Mon, June 12, 2023

Over 20,000 galaxies glimmer in this sweeping view of the sky between the constellations of Pisces and Andromeda. But
more than just an arresting sight, the view has helped astronomers determine what sparked the Epoch of Reionization,
the period when the opaque universe gave way to the transparent one.

The earliest days of the universe were cloaked in a dense gas that limited the amount light could travel through it.
During the Epoch of Reionization—when the universe was about 400 million to one billion years old—the gassy universe
began to clear up, until the entire thing was transparent to light.

The Epoch of Reionization was thus crucial for our own ability to see what the heck happened. The Square Kilometer
Array—the soon-to-be largest radio telescope in the world—is making the enigmatic time period its focus.

It’s now been some 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, and Webb has the perception to peer back to those earliest
eons to understand exactly what changed.

At the center of the above image lies a pinkish light source with six diffraction spikes (artifacts of Webb’s imaging). The
light source is the quasar J0100+2802, an extraordinarily bright galactic nucleus that lights up gas between itself and
Webb.

The composite image includes several exposures by Webb’s NIRCam instrument, seen through different filters; all
exposures were taken on August 22, 2022. Our website can only handle a smaller version of the image; you can see it in
its 127-megabyte glory here.

A team of astronomers—vis-a-vis Webb—used the quasar’s light to study over 100 galaxies from the universe’s first
billion years, focusing on 59 that sit between the quasar and the telescope.

An artist’s concept of a quasar, a luminous galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole at its core.

We expected to identify a few dozen galaxies that existed during the Era of Reionization–but were easily able to pick out
117,” said Daichi Kashino, an astronomer at Nagoya University, and lead author of one of the papers. “Webb has
exceeded our expectations.”

The researchers compared the Webb data with previous observations of the quasar taken by the Keck Observatory, the
European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, and the Las Campanas Observatory’s Magellan Telescope.

Their findings were published in three separate papers, out today in the Astrophysical Journal. One paper focused
on evidence for reionization driven by the young galaxies, a second described the spectroscopy of the stars and gas in
the galaxies, and a third focused on the quasar central to the entire investigation.

The researchers found that regions around the galaxies were bubbles of transparency, suggesting that the galaxies
themselves were involved in the reionization of the universe.

“As we look back into the teeth of reionization, we see a very distinct change,” said study co-author Simon Lilly, an
astronomer at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, and the leader of the research team, in a Space Telescope Science
Institute release. “Galaxies, which are made up of billions of stars, are ionizing the gas around them, effectively
transforming it into transparent gas.”
Light from the quasar showed precisely where it was being absorbed by gas (meaning a region had not yet reionized) or
continued to travel (meaning the area was more transparent.) The transparent regions around galaxies were generally
about 2 million light-years across, according to the same release.

The transparent regions surrounding galaxies swelled and combined, eventually rendering the entire universe
transparent.

One outstanding item Webb alone cannot decipher is how the luminous quasar became so large so early in the
universe’s evolution. J0100+2802 is about 10 billion times the Sun’s mass. How black holes evolve remains a tantalizing
question, as astrophysicists have yet to understand how supermassive black holes become just that, and why there
appears to be so few intermediate-mass black holes (while there’s a plethora of stellar-mass and supermassive ones.)

Webb is on something of a tear when it comes to deep field imaging of ancient galaxies; just last week a deep field with
twice as many galaxies (45,000 in total) as the above image was released.

Webb’s gaze is unflinching, and with scores of researchers poring over its data, the evolution of the early universe—once
a murky mess—is becoming crystalline.
Is Everything in the Universe Doomed to Evaporate?

Cassidy Ward Thu, June 8, 2023

We’re not saying we’re envious of SYFY’s The Ark (streaming now on Peacock), but it’s not all bad news aboard the Ark
One. Sure, their ship is damaged and a substantial portion of the crew is dead. And, yes, they are still light-years away
from their destination with challenges and perils aplenty. It isn’t ideal, but they do get to explore the universe while the
rest of us are stuck at home, watching it on TV.

That’s not nothing, but if we want to get out and explore the cosmos ourselves, we might want to get started. Because
everything in the universe is eventually destined to evaporate in a puff of entropic smoke, according to a recent posted
to the ArXiv pre-print server.

RELATED: 'The Ark' writers 'went through so many iterations' of explosive Season 1 finale for new SYFY series

As they get new data, astronomers are constantly updating our view of how the universe will end, but here’s more or
less what we think will happen. As the universe expands and the space between objects grows ever greater, activity in
the universe will begin to wind down. Eventually, there won’t be enough gas and dust in dense enough clumps to form
new stars, and the universe will blink out. The remaining dark universe will be populated by black holes and little else.
With nothing left to feed them, the black holes will slowly release radiation as they evaporate into nothingness.

How Radiation Escapes Black Holes

It’s true that nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole. Once you go in, you’re in for good. However, it is also
true that black holes do lose mass over time, thanks to a quirk of quantum mechanics, which is where Stephen Hawking
comes in. In 1974, he figured out that mass is lost from black holes through quantum radiation. But why does
this happen?

Small fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime occur all the time, and they manifest as particle-antiparticle pairs which blip
in and out of existence almost instantaneously. Most of the time, they annihilate one another as soon as they appear,
and the universal balance is maintained. But if a pair pops into existence near a black hole’s event horizon, one of them
can be lost before they can annihilate themselves. The antiparticle falls into the black hole while the particle flits away to
parts unknown. This process became known as Hawking radiation and is believed to be the ultimate fate of the
supermassive black holes that will be the last residents of the universe.

Evaporation for the Masses

The new study from researchers at Radboud University in The Netherlands confirms Hawking’s predictions about black
holes and extends them to other large objects. According to their calculations, an event horizon isn’t a necessary
component for these particle-antiparticle separations. Instead, gravity and the associated curvature of spacetime are all
that’s needed. As a result, any large object capable of sufficiently curving spacetime should experience a similar form of
radiation.

RELATED: Scientists Created a Black Hole to Prove Hawking Radiation

“That means that objects without an event horizon, such as the remnants of dead stars and other large objects in the
universe, also have this sort of radiation. And, after a very long period, that would lead to everything in the universe
eventually evaporating, just like black holes. This changes not only our understanding of Hawking radiation but also our
view of the universe and its future,” said Heino Falcke, one of the study’s authors, in a statement.
Fortunately, we’ve got at least a few trillion years before the universe really starts winding down. We’re not certain that
evaporating is a pleasant way to go.

When you put things into cosmic perspective, the events of The Ark don’t seem so bad.
BLACK HOLE CONJURED UP IN A LAB DOES THE SAME WEIRD THINGS STEPHEN HAWKING THOUGHT IT WOULD DO

By Elizabeth Rayne March 12, 2021, 6:21 AM ET

Black hole.

When something rips physics apart, you cross over into the quantum realm, a place inhabited by black holes, wormholes
and other things that have been the stars of multiple sci-fi movies. What lives in the quantum realm either hasn’t been
proven to exist (yet) or behaves strangely if it does exist.

Black holes often venture into that realm. With these collapsed stars — at least most of them are — being impossible to
fly a spacecraft into (unless you never want to see it again), one physicist decided that the best way to get up close to
them was under a literal microscope. Jeff Steinhauer wanted to know whether black holes radiate particles like the late
Stephen Hawking theorized they would. Because one of these leviathans would never fit in a lab, he and his research
team created one right here on Earth.

“We have to understand how we see the Hawking radiation sound waves falling in and coming out,” Steinhauer, who co-
authored a study recently published in Nature Physics, told SYFY WIRE. “They should be very slight. Seeing this radiation
from a real black hole is too weak and would be totally overpowered by other sources of radiation, which is why we
want to see it in an analog system.”

This black hole analog was more of a tube as opposed to the spectacular swirling things you might see in NASA images
like the one above. Anyway, the light show around such a monster black holes is really just all the dust and gas and other
star stuff it devours. Steinhauer’s team had no need for an entire accretion disc. They just wanted to see if one of the
quantum entangled particles that went to the brink of the event horizon would escape as Hawking predicted. Quantum
entanglement means that two particles will behave in exactly the same way, wherever they are in time and space.

Stephen Hawking, who theorized that black holes radiate photons back into space.

When one of a pair of entangled particles goes too far and passes the event horizon, but the other manages to stay just
on the edge of the point of no return, it eventually will get radiated back out into space. This is Hawking radiation. In an
analog black hole made of rubidium gas, researchers substituted sound waves for the light waves black holes eat in
space because rubidium atoms zoom faster than the speed of sound, so no sound wave that reaches the event
horizon can ever escape. However, the other entangled sound wave would be outside the event horizon, where the gas
flow was much slower and it was able to move around.

“We had to look for something correlated inside and outside the black hole,” Steinhauer said. “Every time there’s a bit of
wave inside the black hole, there’s wave outside of black hole, and that had to be repeated thousands of time. You have
to keep looking for a wave inside and a simultaneous wave coming out.”

Because the camera that photographed the analog black hole would instantly destroy it, the analog had to be recreated
over and over. Each of these was about 0.1 milimeters long and made of about 8,000 atoms. Just to give an idea of
exactly how mind-blowingly small this is, the period at the end of this sentence has at least a billion atoms. Every time a
new analog was created, the team needed to find pairs of sound waves that had one wave moving toward the even
horizon and the other already past it. Rubidium gas flows faster than the speed of sound, so that prevented one of these
sound waves from breaking out, just like the crushing gravity of a black hole in space means imminent doom.

What taking photos on repeat proved was that Hawking radiation remains constant. The team needed so much data to
find enough correlations between how all these pairs of sound waves behaved. Turned out they did the same thing
every time, so Hawking was right. At least this experiment proved him right. Until we can find some way to study black
holes in space with a telescope more technologically advanced than we can ever imagine, theoretical studies like
Hawking’s will have to support whether this is likely to happen in actual black holes. Steinhauer wants to go further, as
in quantum gravity.

“I would like to go beyond Hawking’s calculation, to take quantum gravity into account,” he said. “According to general
relativity, you can figure out regular gravity if you know how massive a body is. Quantum gravity has randomness like
any quantum mechanical system. I also want to see how Hawking radiation is analogous to things such as air molecules
scattering sound.”

The weirdness of black holes, and what they could mean for spacetime, never really ends.